My meditation in a Buddhist temple was interrupted by an inner voice screaming at me to declutter. I am now, years later, facing the mental anguish over decluttering. The physical process is easy, but learning the mental fortitude to detach myself, even somewhat, from frivolous material possession is overwhelming. I must control my hoarding addiction. I’ll still buy and use things, but rather than let them control me, I must learn illusionary control over materialism.

There’s this depressive sludge I’m crawling through right now, as a hoarder that is decluttering and packing up my collection, that eerily reminds me of other addictions. The biggest I learned as a furniture mover was that it’s easier to move other people’s stuff than your own because you don’t have an attachment to their stuff. Learning the decisiveness to keep or toss material possessions, while pretentiously first-world, does remind me of quitting other addictions.

“Think of [moving] like Tetris. You’ve gotta fit everything into one space.[1]” Inmanypuzzle games, you get bonus points for lumping similar pieces together. That sort of design philosophy carries over into album sorting as well. How strictly do you adhere to empirical alphabetical order? Do you count articles [the/el]? Do you lump side projects by members of a band with the band’s discography? Or do you loosely lump albums by genre or …mood?

[1022] Oops! Forgot about publishing this. Well, plenty has changed over the past 13 weeks and 92 publications. I originally made these “Betzom check-ins” primarily to comment on how I’ve evolved as a writer, with a slight convenience being something easy to write about. These past 92 days have seen my biggest launching in success yet, and I’m only poised to go succeed more from here… so much so that I didn’t even need the crutch of this essay.

A difficult but necessary question I ask myself while looking at every single item I own is: “Why keep this?” Sometimes, the answer is a clear “there is no reason,” so off it goes into the sell or donate piles to address later. However, for everything remaining, of which this is now the fourth box of random action figures or objects, the question begs a little more nuance. Every object here should have a justification.

Which is better: a well-balanced breakfast or some snack bar? What main metrics are we considering? Nutrition or time? Are there ways we can make it easier for ourselves to cook efficient breakfasts that will give us sustenance throughout the day? If so, are there are ways we can preemptively prepare food for ourselves throughout the day? Let’s consider how we can reduce mild feelings of sickness, laziness, or tiredness with changes to our routines.

I own some CDs I haven’t heard in over 11 years. As I’m packing up everything to move, I’m not doing a decisively thorough cut of my collections. If that means moving an additional box of CDs I’ll later sell/donate, that’s fine. I’m just doing a preliminary sort at this time. But as I put away this particular box of CDs, the question came to mind: when will I next listen to all of these CDs?

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